1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to electrical engineering, namely to manufacturing of electric devices, and in particular, to methods for manufacture of liquid-metal composite contacts used in switching units in, preferably, power networks, including vacuum switching units.
2. Description of the Related Art
In terms of technological essence, the method for manufacture of liquid-metal composite contact comprising the stages of producing fabric of high-melting metal based wire, where fabric is in the form of a strip having the arranged structure, rolling said fabric into cylindrical workpiece and installing it into a matrix, pressing the workpiece to obtain the structure having desired dimensions, reduction of the structure in the environment of the hydride hydrogen obtained in a vacuum furnace, soaking the structure with low-melting alloy in the hydride hydrogen environment (Declarative Patent of Ukraine for invention No. 62376A, IPC7 H01H 9/00, Publ. 15.12.2003, Bul. No. 12, 2003) is the closest to the proposed method. In the described method, the structure is produced of tungsten, molybdenum and rhenium based alloys.
The drawback of the described method is in insufficient soaking of the porous structure by low-melting alloy due to insufficient wettability of high-melting metal of the structure by low-melting alloy. This results in nonuniformity of the transient electric resistance across the contact section, causing appearance of the overheating zones and early degradation of the structure.